ST. PETERSBURG - With another storm looming, it is hard to feel lucky.
But Floridians have the benefit of satellite imagery, hurricane hunter aircraft and a variety of news media to warn of approaching bad weather.
Scuba divers and fishermen, however, know that this has not always been the case. The Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea are littered with wrecks of ships that have been caught in open water by passing storms.
Paging through Michael C. Barnette's Shipwrecks of the Sunshine State: Florida's Submerged History, I came across numerous victims of hurricanes past.
Locally, many divers and fishermen may know the story of the Bayronto. On Sept. 11, 1919, the 400-foot freighter was carrying 7,000 tons of wheat from Galveston, Texas, to Marseille, France, when it was hit by a powerful hurricane.
The pounding waves slowly worked on the hull, which had been damaged by a German torpedo in the English Channel. The captain ordered the ship abandoned and launched two lifeboats.
The survivors spent several days at sea before being rescued. The ship sits upside down in 100 feet of water, the keel within 75 feet of the surface. The hull is split open and accessible to divers with wreck- and/or cave diving experience. Divers continue to find a variety of artifacts. Fishermen find the Bayronto an excellent place for grouper and amberjack (26.45.80N, 82.50.84W).
The Florida Keys, because of their closer proximity to the tropics, have the greatest number of hurricane-related wrecks.
But perhaps the most interesting of all Florida hurricane wrecks is the Valbanera. This Spanish passenger liner, capable of carrying 1,200, left the Canary Islands in the summer of 1919 with a shipment of olives, dried fruit and wine, bound for Puerto Rico, Cuba, Texas and Louisiana.
When it arrived in Santiago de Cuba on Sept. 5, more than half the ship's passengers disembarked, perhaps because there were rumors that a hurricane was brewing in the gulf. The ship left port as scheduled, but when it arrived on Sept. 8 in Havana, hurricane force winds were battering the port city. The ship's captain thought the harbor entrance looked too rough and chose to ride out the storm, the same one that would claim the Bayronto.
The Valbanera headed north, and that was the last time anybody would see it floating.
Authorities began searching for the ship a week later. On Sept. 19, the U.S. sub chaser SC-203 found the wreck 5 miles east of Rebecca Shoal, 46 miles west of Key West, in an area local boaters call the Quicksands. Divers looked for bodies, but there were no signs of the 488 passengers.
Rescuers theorized that the survivors escaped, but subsequent dives revealed that the lifeboats were intact. Additional dives found no bodies, but members of the salvage crew detected a foul odor emanating from the hull.
Over the years, stories began to circulate about the Valbanera, which would go down as one of the worst maritime disasters to occur in the state's waters. Theories included the survivors landing in Florida towns and starting new lives, being abducted by aliens and being victims of the Bermuda Triangle.
Over the years, mariners have had to deal with hurricanes as just another cost of doing business. It's frustrating and at times maddening. Jimmy Buffet summed it up best in his 1974 song Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season, a good candidate for the new official state song:
And now I must confess, I could use some rest.
I can't run at this pace very long.
Yes, it's quite insane, I think it hurts my brain.
But it cleans me out and then I can go on.